This is why analytics review, collection, analysis and assessment are absolutely critical for marketers, content creators and thought leaders. It’s often referred to as big data.

People tell you what they think by how they spend their time. Assess your readership daily, weekly, monthly and…yes…annually. The trends will help you shape your go-forward editorial and promotional strategies.

I’ve included below the four best read posts on the “Strategic Guy” blog in 2015. My take-away: best practices in b2b sales is a high interest topic among marketers, which validates Strategic Communications Group’s (Strategic) decision to broaden the editorial footprint of our Modern Marketing Today site and community.

Here is an attention grabbing find from a study conducted in 2014 by the Business Marketing Association, Online Marketing Institute and Forrester Research: 83 percent of marketers are unable to measure business value from their content marketing efforts.

Everyone messes up something, somewhere at some time. Someone who tells you otherwise is either: a) a liar or b) delusional. It is how a person responds to flaws and failures that reflects their professionalism.

A dozen teenagers gathered on a Saturday morning in Bethesda, MD to study entrepreneurship. Now, that was a sight to see.

Due to my 20+ year run as the founder and owner of a professional services firm, I was invited to speak at a session hosted by the Bethesda Entrepreneurship Academy. I realized after a quick review of the exceptional speakers recruited by Zain Yaqub (the Academy’s founder and a teen entrepreneur himself) that I needed a unique and unexpected topic.

My presentation, entitled “The Entrepreneurial Spirit: Wealth & Empowerment,” delivered just that. In what I believe was a refreshingly candid and entertaining style (hey, I perform stand-up comedy as a hobby), I sought to disabuse these future business titans of the notion that success is measured by your take home pay.

Rather, the value of business creation is in the ability to craft more meaningful and intimate relationships with family, friends, community, etc., while building a lifestyle which is consistent with a belief system.

Here are the five steps to business creation I offered during the presentation:

Identify the things important to you in life.

Make an honest assessment of your strengths and weaknesses.

Define the personality type(s) you most successfully work with.

Construct a business plan that aligns accordingly.

Drip with self-confidence.

Did my message resonate?

Admittedly, it was hard to tell. The youthful audience was reasonably well engaged during my talk, yet the Q&A afterwards lacked any significant meaning or depth.

Perhaps it was merely a reflection of the date/time of the event? Or maybe I came off too much as a tyrannical type A?

Or, worse, this group may not be ready for entrepreneurship…yet?

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UPDATE (12.16.15)

The president of the Bethesda Entrepreneurship Academy sent me this thoughtful Email to clarity how engaged and responsive the students were to my thoughts about the meaning and value of entrepreneurship.

Dear Mr. Hausman,

Thank you for making the time to share what you have obviously spent decades mastering and delivering in your own company. We loved your talk and especially how dynamic your presentation was. After you left, there was a a great deal of classroom discussion in the second hour about the points you had made, and engagement on the ideas you had presented. Particularly on your stories about prioritizing what really matters.

At your request, your very generous visit with us was of a different format than the normal Q/A format that the entire class is typically run with. So some students may have been a bit hesitant to speak up at first, because of the departure from the standard teaching style. But I want to assure you that the students benefited greatly from your visit and from the lessons you shared with us. As we continue to work hard towards creating our own businesses, your wisdom will resonate and stay with us. We look forward to following in your footsteps – both as an entrepreneur and as one who gives of his time to his community, the way you did with your talk. Thank you again.

I’m referring to Paul Duning, the publisher of Capitol Communicator, and his partner Paul Sherman, who is editor-in-chief of Techwire Publications. Together, the Pauls host the Mid-Atlantic Marketing Summit, a gathering of communications professionals, corporate and field marketers, agency and service provider representatives, and technologists who work for companies in the Washington, DC area.

More than 400 people came together last month at the Gannett/USA Today headquarters building to network, share best practices and listen to an exceptional set of speakers. I was fortunate to be on the agenda with a presentation entitled “The Intersection Point: Where Content, Social and Sales Collide.”

In addition to my talk, I also hosted a panel discussion that included marketers from FireEye, ICF International, Iron Bow Technologies and Privia Health.

So…how did it go?

You can watch the video of my entertaining and informative talk and panel below, and check out blogger reviews of the presentation here and here.

And, if you’d like more insight about how companies like yours are aligning their content marketing programs with tactical sales activities, join me this Friday, May 9 at 11:30 AM ET for a Webinar hosted by marketing automation provider eTrigue. You can register at this link.

It happened to me last year at industry conferences in San Francisco, Boston, Orlando and Vancouver. I stepped off stage after a presentation and audience members asked where they can buy my book.

“I don’t have a book,” I’d say. To which they would respond, “Maybe you should.”

I’m thrilled to share that my first ever professional text is now available. The book is entitled The Intersection Point: Where Content, Sales and Social Collide and it’s available for download at no cost at this link. You don’t even need to register to receive the book as a PDF.

The Intersection Point is an easy and informative read about how companies create engaging, thought leadership content, and then put it to work to support tactical sales activities. I’ve also included exclusive interviews with a few of the most respected corporate marketers and consultants in the industry.

Take a read…let me know what you think.

Video of my keynote address at the Inbound Marketing Summit in Boston in October 2013 – Be Heard in a Crowd: How the Right Content and Social Strategy Will Drive Sales.

If knowledge is power, then today’s sales professional is the proverbial 100 pound weakling.

Consider these sobering statistics from a recently published report entitled “Know More to Grow More” that was issued by the Chief Marketing Officer (CMO) Council:

–Only 9 percent of surveyed marketers said their organization has a customer intelligence system to deliver real time, account-based news, social insights and customer developments to the sales team.

–Just 37 percent reported they have access to a system to integrate and share customer information between sales and service, support, channel, in-store or field assets.

OK…so let’s translate. It appears that in most companies the sales reps — who typically have frequent interaction and touch with customers and prospects – have little (if any) insight about how these critical audiences are engaging online, in social environments and even with their own company.

Not surprisingly, the CMO Council’s online poll of 230 corporate marketers also found that eight out of 10 respondents are dissatisfied with the current level of conversion of prospects into customers.

Again, translation: our company invests a lot of resources to identify and nurture leads which we then do a poor job of actually turning into revenue. Ouch!

Of course, the argument could be made that an effective sales professional will glean intelligence from direct and in-person conversations with a prospect. That hope is and will remain unrealized because of two significant and accelerating trends.

The first is what I often refer to as the “enlightened buyer.” Customers, prospects and partners now conduct a significant amount of due diligence about a company and its solutions through Web search and social interaction prior to speaking with the sales team.

Think about how you make a purchase decision – on the job or at home. Do you pick up the phone and call the company? Do you respond to a promotional Email? Probably not. You research, talk to colleagues or friends, form an opinion and, only then, initiate a conversation.

The second trend is an age-old truism. Prospects ignore and lie to sales reps. Why? Because no one likes being pitched. And it’s uncomfortable to tell someone “no.”

We’ve identified the problem: a company’s sales team is often woefully uninformed about customer and prospect needs and requirements. The solution is fairly clearly, right? Marketers need to spend more time communicating with sales – in-person, electronically and through scalable enterprise systems.

Executing on that solution is where the challenge lies.

Admittedly, no one has landed on a sure-fire way to “intelli-gize” sales. (Yes, I made up that word.)

However, here are a couple of resources to check out for best practices on how a marketer can effectively collaborate with a sales team.